How does Quora differ from other Q&A SNS?

Broadly, quality, technology, design, community, and purpose differentiate Quora. Quora isn’t trying to do one thing markedly better: instead, the focus is on improving many small aspects of Q&A.

For background on other Q&A sites, visit those mentioned in What are other Q&A sites besides Quora? and Q&A Websites: Who are Quora’s main competitors?

Quality

Quora answers are often thorough and comprehensive:
What would you advise your (hypothetical) 22-year old college-grad child to do with his or her life?
Startup Failure: Why do startups fail?

Many come from subject experts:
Deputy editor at the Economist: Gideon Lichfield’s answer to The Economist: What methodology does The Economist use to get the prices by country for its Big Mac Index?
A Hollywood actor: Ashton Kutcher’s answer to What determines whether an actor is cast in a part in Hollywood?
Co-founder of Netscape, the IPO that started the Internet Era: Marc Andreessen’s answer to What are some good reasons to take a technology company public?

Quality differentiates Quora from Yahoo Answers, WikiAnswers, and many Q&A websites. What is the need for Quora when Yahoo! Answers has such widespread adoption? Noteworthy exceptions are the StackExchange websites, such as StackOverflow, which are useful subject-specific resources. Hacker News is also thoughtful discussion, and the HN community has influenced Quora.

Vital to quality discussion is quality questions. Questions are not owned by the questioner; they are often edited by other users on Quora: good questions beget good answers. Full sentences, correct grammar, and clear questions address the “broken windows”[1] mentality: if people see sloppy, incoherent or half-formed questions, they will tend to the same in responses (consciously or not). This applies to the site as a whole: if a user browses Quora and sees high-quality discussion, he or she will be inclined to contribute the same. Consistent questions are much easier to read and respond to. Why do my questions get edited on Quora?

Technology

Quora is known as a Q&A website, but beneath it is remarkable technology, an exceptionally high-quality real-time web framework.

The result is subtle. Users see real-time behavior: interactive and engaging experiences where questions, answers, notifications appear without a page reload. Pages update themselves, automatically[2]. One can become accustomed to this without conscious thought; I find myself on other websites where the sport scores or stock prices doesn’t update and wondering what’s wrong! What languages and frameworks were used to code Quora?

The framework allows us to build things quickly[3][4] and makes the site snappy: fast loading, fast search, fast updating. Why is the Quora website so fast? The design is scalable, guided by Adam and Charlie’s experience building a web service for hundreds of millions of users. Why did Quora choose Python for its development? and Why does Quora use MySQL as the data store rather than NoSQLs such as Cassandra, MongoDB, CouchDB, etc?

Great technology has another benefit: it attracts great engineers. Quora’s team is one of the strongest in Silicon Valley. What is it like to work at Quora?

Design

If you have used another Q&A website, you may readily appreciate Quora’s design: clean, simple, and intuitive. There are no ads or distractions: user content is first and foremost. The site is built around an topic and follower model, which makes it easy to browse content relevant to you, and facilitates distribution of interesting new activity. Quora: What are the best features of Quora’s user interface?

I’m not a designer, but after using Quora and looking at other Q&A sites, I appreciate how easily good design can be taken for granted.

Community

Only recently have people’s identities have come online, thanks to the ubiquity of LinkedIn and Facebook. Real names are a key part of Quora that make it unlike Q&A sites of the past, providing authenticity and accountability. Although anonymity is available on Quora, answers with a user’s name are more visible, upvoted, and trustworthy

Yet LinkedIn Answers has had the same elements of identity and hasn’t seen adoption: Why has LinkedIn Answers failed to take off the same way Quora has? Quora has gone a step farther, leveraging social connections to yield discussion and content relevant to you, and provided positive social feedback mechanisms: upvotes, followers, and endorsements without making the experience game-like or intrusive. Quora has users who really love the site (obsessively so, at times!), which is incredibly rewarding. Why Users Love Quora: Why is Quora so addictive?

Though Quora shares Twitter’s follower model, the discussion is different: it is oriented around insightful information sharing. The CTO of Amazon can share his thoughts on What kind of CTO are you?, someone can ask the CEO of Mozilla How did you get recruited to Mozilla?  Do you have plans after Mozilla?, you can hear from the founder and CEO of Yelp Yelp: How did Yelp get its name?, or just follow the discussion on Why has Microsoft seemingly stopped innovating?, while also seeing what friends and colleagues are asking about.

I’m excited to see intelligent and high-profile people using Quora. I don’t think there is any other Q&A service that has been blessed with the same attention. Quora tries hard to make this site an environment for civil, intellectual discussion, and hope it provides the opportunity for some of the great thought leaders of our time to share their knowledge and thinking with a receptive audience.

Purpose

What is Quora? Quora is about lasting, reusable, and referenceable information. Questions are collaborative and get better with time: users can edit the question, suggest answer edits, add related questions, vote on content, or follow for distribution and updates.

This is why certain types of questions are discouraged: polls and surveys (What you you think … / Does anybody know …) do not make great reference sources. Quora Question Policies & Guidelines: Are poll and survey questions allowed on Quora?

Quora has a taken horizontal approach to topics, tackling discussion in all fields. This differentiates the service from other high quality resources, such as StackOverflow. This is an issue of much debate: Why does Fred Wilson think that a lot of vertical Q&A sites like StackOverflow will perform better than horizontal Q&A sites like Quora?

Some interesting use cases for Quora have come up:

• As a cache: Quora gives answers, not just information or search results. Although an answer may be easily researchable, asking the question and writing an answer on Quora save work for the next person and digest down the results succinctly to address the question or get more details. See Why do people use Quora on questions where Google or Wikipedia would seem to be more than sufficient? and Is it bad form to ask questions on Quora for which definitive answers can be easily found via search engines / Google?

• For information not available elsewhere on the Internet: information that may only live inside someone’s head, colored by their personal experience, such as What does Dustin Moskovitz think of the Facebook movie?
• In real-time information and breaking news discussion, such as AngelGate: Who are the Super Angels that Michael Arrington is talking about in his 9/21/10 Techcrunch post, “So a Blogger Walks into a Bar…”? and Is “Google Me” a fake rumor, a misleading evolutionary product update or really a new social network from Google?

It’s worth mentioning Quora and Wikipedia. Article growth on Wikipedia has tapered off in the last few years. Yet there are many questions Wikipedia does not answer (or answers with too much information!). Quora can provide specific discussion that can be written from multiple points of view: What’s the story with the rise of today’s Tea Party and its role in politics? Coming from experts with first-hard knowledge, many answers are a citable resource. More discussion on How is Quora different from Wikipedia?

Afew words on incentives: Quora is about quality of answers over quantity. It’s not a game with points and badges: more subtle feedback mechanisms are in place: Why doesn’t Quora display karma/reputation/badges?

In particular, money does not incentive intellectual discourse [5], and particularly, it does not yield quality. Money motivates junk and gaming of the system: writing answers not because they know the answer, but because they have an artificial incentive to do so [6]. Interesting thoughts on Q&A incentives in Chris Thomson’s answer to How is Quora different from Mahalo Answers?

Rational economic thinkers search for people’s incentives to contribute to something like Quora or Wikipedia. But I, among many others, do it simply out of curiosity and the desire to share what we know. What’s my incentive to post answers on Quora?

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Other thoughts:

Q&A is a hard problem. It will take a whole company, entirely dedicated to Q&A, to make a product that works really well. The biggest players on the Internet have tried (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, MSN, AOL, Answers) alongside a myriad of startups. Q&A has been called a saturated market, yet none have come to dominate it, and there is still no single great reference for Q&A content on the Internet. First entrants to the market have illustrated how big, how important, and how difficult Q&A is.  I believe making Q&A work well is a challenge greater than competing with any Internet giant. This is a hallmark of an outstanding opportunity: in the same manner as Google in the search market of 1998 and Facebook in the social networking space of 2004. There are many hard problems to solve: effective search (semantic meaning, duplicate detection, clustering); community management and privacy; promotional material [7] and monetization.

The competition is good.  It keeps us sharp and pointed in the right direction.

Q&A is an important problem. Questions are an interesting model: they serve to so effectively summon up information and justify it’s existence.

Regardless of Quora’s long-term success, I think we will have succeeded in moving the Internet forward in content, technology, design, and community.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro…
[2] try editing a question in one browser window and watch it live-update in another open window!
[3] Making a web component live-update-able only requires a single line of code.
[4] faster than other Q&A sites can copy!
[5] http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pin…
[6] Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational on behavioral economics gives great discussion on this.
[7] linking to your own site is OK right now, so long as it’s part of a genuine response and is full disclosed.

About Saul Fleischman

Working with social web apps developers on getting things made: my role tends to be functionality ideation, user experience, and also, marketing communications and community development.

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